"Spanning psychoanalysis, law, and aesthetics, and reading richly and with passion, David L. Eng's "The Feeling of Kinship" looks at transnational adoption as an exemplary scene of contemporary intimacy in the United States. This is a fearless book that knows and feels what it means to have to defend oneself from the 'liberal' place in which one lives; what it means racially, sexually, and legally to have to be defensive in a nation that identifies itself with freedom."--Lauren Berlant, author of "The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture"

Preface ix
Introduction: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy 1
1. The Law of Kinship: Lawrence v. Texas and the Emergence of Queer Liberalism 23
2. The Structure of Kinship: The Art of Waiting in The Book of Salt and Happy Together 58
3. The Language of Kinship: Transnational Adoption and Two Mothers in First Person Plural 93
4. The Prospect of Kinship: Transnational Adoption and Racial Reparation (with Shinhee Han, Ph.D.) 138
5. The Feeling of Kinship: Affect and Language in History and Memory 166
Notes 199
Bibliography 225
Index 239

David L. Eng is Professor in the Department of English, the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, and the Program in Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America, also published by Duke University Press, and a co-editor of Loss: The Politics of Mourning and Q&A: Queer in Asian America.